There is a big controversy in the US over whether the police are racist, not over whether the police have cognitive biases.

Hm. I don't think it's this clear a distinction. Clinton seems to be suggesting there is perhaps more nuance to the issue than just arguing about whether or not lots of cops are racist.

I would be overjoyed if presidential candidates really were discussing cognitive biases.

Interesting. I was very happy to hear Clinton speak of implicit bias because it seemed to be a way to advance the discussion to something more rational.

Also check out physics.SE and physicsoverflow

I think that in many cases uncovering a potential tax evasion might not be enough to get that money, it might require prosecution and large scale evidence collection. Maybe it's not worth it unless amount of evaded taxes is large?

We're not talking about all of science. (Though I stand by my claim that he started it, unless you can point to someone else writing down a workable scientific method beforehand.) We're talking about whether or not anthropic reasoning tells us to expect to see people building the LHC, at a cost of $1 billion per year.

Thatcher apparently rejected the idea as presented, and rightly too if the Internet accurately reported the pitch they made to her. (In this popular account, the Higgs mechanism doesn't "explain mass," it replaces one arbitrary number with another! I still don't know the actual reasons for believing in it!) So we don't need to imagine humanity dying out, and we don't need to assume that civilization collapses after using up irreplaceable fossil fuels. (Though that one seems somewhat plausible.) I don't think we even need to assume religious tyranny crushes respect for science. Slightly less radical changes to the culture of a small fraction of the world seem sufficient to prevent the LHC expenditure for the foreseeable future. Add in uncertainty about various risks that fall short of total annihilation, and this certainty starts to look ridiculous.

Now as I said, one could make a different anthropic argument based on population in various 'worlds'. But as I also said, I don't think we know enough to get a high probability from that either.

That specific thesis is mostly just an example. Much of what I would say would be paraphrasing the work of someone else (Lee Jussim mainly) and explaining its relevance to this community. I could do this if people thought it would be productive, but its just one of many topics that I think are misunderstood on a large scale.

My more general interest is in the less-known fact that many of our hardwired biases and heuristics were designed by natural selection (e.g., negativity bias) to improve accuracy based on goal-relevant criteria. It also seems that the biases formed in response to the environment (e.g., much of the content comprising a stereotype) track reality to a surprising degree. Imagine a marksman who practices shooting at the same firing range everyday and this range generally has a side-wind in the same direction and intensity. The marksman can manually adjust for this by placing his reticle upwind of the target, but he could also adjust his scope's reticle such that he can aim for the bulls-eye and account for the wind at the same time. Once the adjustment is made to the scope, he many have a "biased" tool, but his shots are still centered on the bullseye (on average) and the only online calculations needed to account for the wind on a shot-by-shot basis are minute. What if the marksman moves to another range? Well, in time, he will see his shots wildly missing and make the proper adjustments. This is probably not a novel analogy, but the surprising thing to me is that social psychology tends to frame any "reticle adjustment" as a bias against which we must fight without testing its performance in the contexts under which the adjustment was made. It's not that biases and heuristics don't cause problems, its that we have a much poorer understanding of when they cause problems than our field claims.

This general idea applies to stereotypes, but also:

• Negativity Bias
• Attribution errors (including the FAE)
• Availability heuristic
• Clustering bias and other illusory correlation-type biases
• Base rate neglect
• Confirmation Bias (this claim might get me in trouble here... haha)
• etc.

Game theory research reveals fragility of common resources

"In many applications, people decide how much of a resource to use, and they know that if they use a certain amount and if others use a certain amount they are going to get some return, but at the risk that the resource is going to fail,"

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160929143603.htm

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825616300458

Maybe your point is that emotional empathy feels morally significant and when we act on it, we can feel that we fulfilled our moral obligations.

This actually has a name. It's called moral licensing.

Yes, emotional empathy does not optimize effective altruism, or your moral idea of good. But this is true of lots of emotions, desires and behaviors, including morally significant ones. You're singling out emotional empathy, but what makes it special?

I agree with you that nothing makes them special. But you seem to view this as a reductio ad absurdum. Doing the same for all other emotions which might bias us or get in the way of doing what’s moral would not lead to a balanced lifestyle, to say the least.

But we could just as easily bite that bullet. Why should we expect optimizing purely for morality to lead to a balanced lifestyle? Why wouldn’t the 80/20 rule apply to moral concerns? Under this view, one would do best to amputate most parts of one’s mind that made them human, and add parts to become a morality maximizer.

Obviously this would cause serious problems in reality, and may not actually be the best way to maximize morality even if it was possible. This is just a sort of spherical cow in a vacuum level concept.

Why doesn't the U.S. government hire more tax auditors? If every hired auditor can either uncover or deter (threat of chance of audit) tax evasion, it would pay for itself, create jobs, increase revenue, punish those who cheat. Estimated cost of tax evasion per year to the Federal gov is 450B.

Incompetent government tropes include agencies that hire too many people and becoming inappropriate profit centers. It would seem that the IRS should have at the very least been accidentally competent in this regard.

While we are at the topic of cognitive biases, how do you know that's the case? Quite many people believe that they are much more open than they are.

I don't know. I'm probably biased. But I feel pretty strongly that I'd like to know the truth. I'm sure I'm subject to the same deep, irrational Red v. Blue tribalism as most other humans, but I try to be as rational as I can.

The fact that you for example didn't follow up with the request to explain your own view in this thread is a sign that you don't put effort into engaging in the kind of actions that require you to actually express your ideas explicitly enough to find flaws.

Ah. I assumed your earlier comment in this thread was misplaced and you intended, "Lumifer: I, like Brillyant, am also interested in hearing your view." I am flattered you care about my view.

As I mentioned, I consider myself ignorant on the issue. That is, quite literally, I admit I don't know and have low confidence in my views..

I think I've eluded to those views in this thread...

Politically, I'm generally empathetic toward ideas like affirmative action in the U.S. on the basis of race because there has been serious discrimination in the U.S. on the basis of race in the past. It makes practical sense to posit it created a "headstart" for races who were not... enslaved... and otherwise discriminated against and it makes ethical sense to employ measures to even the score.

and

It seems obvious to me that [past slavery in America] does [have a large impact on African Americans in the present day U.S.], and that the effects are wide and deep, as slavery (and Jim Crow) is relatively recent history—We're only a handful of generations from a time where a race of people was enslaved and systemically kept from accumulating wealth and education.

What more would you like to know?

I think it's pretty easy to hypothesize about the possible effects of slavery vs. no slavery.

In the context of this thread, it was mentioned that the murder rate was much higher for blacks versus whites. If there are socioeconomic reasons for this, then I'm curious about slavery's contribution to those factors.

Politically, I'm generally empathetic toward ideas like affirmative action in the U.S. on the basis of race because there has been serious discrimination in the U.S. on the basis of race in the past. It makes practical sense to posit it created a "headstart" for races who were not... enslaved... and otherwise discriminated against and it makes ethical sense to employ measures to even the score.

I'm open to the idea ideas like AA may not actually practically work and could be persuaded as such by the evidence.